


She Cannot Wait

by fairchildandlarabee



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Golden Lace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 12:24:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3067736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairchildandlarabee/pseuds/fairchildandlarabee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lacey possesses the sharpest mind in Storybrooke. She also screws men for money, so you can guess how the townsfolk see her. Golden Lace AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Cannot Wait

**Author's Note:**

> My gift to rumpledesu for the 2014 Rumbelle Secret Santa Exchange.

Lacey possesses the sharpest mind in Storybrooke. She also fucks men for money. Societies tend to prize women’s chastity over their intelligence, so it should come as no surprise that the townsfolk call her Racy Lacey and not, say, Book-Casey Lacey.

Not that it bothers Lacey.

There aren’t many people in Storybrooke whose company she finds tolerable, and if she spends too much time around others, they try to psychoanalyze her. Dead mummy, drunk daddy, of course she’s a hooker. After shrinking her, people inevitably want to save her, and Lacey has no interest in salvation. She enjoys sex, too, so long as her clients give her a wide emotional berth, so lets not confuse ourselves and think her chosen profession has damaged her unduly. One need look no further than the aforementioned dead mummy and the drunk daddy to see why Lacey expects the worst of others and gives as good as she gets.

Yes, if you got her drunk enough and pressed her on the subject, it does bother her when her johns look right through her in public, but Lacey would be sure to add: she hasn’t yet met a problem that shooting high proof alcohol won’t solve. 

_________________

Mr. Gold -- no first name, bastards like him are born without those -- possesses the second sharpest mind in Storybrooke. True, his considerable intelligence failed to predict his late wife’s penchant for eyeliner and low rise jeans, especially on scruffy Irish pricks. And since that failure lead to an even greater one, Gold doesn’t put much stock in his intelligence.

Not when his ruthlessness serves him so well.

_________________

Unsurprisingly, when Christmas Eve rolls around, both Lacey and Gold find themselves alone and too proud to admit they wish they had company.

They find each other in the liquor aisle of Mr. Clark’s drugstore, two unhappy souls wondering how far in the bottle they will have to climb before their rawness will be rubbed smooth. It doesn’t take much more than a shared look, a come-hither smile, the thrall of their respective reputations as Storybrooke’s most infamous residents, before they decide to climb inside each other instead.

_________________

Lacey slides into the passenger seat of Gold’s Cadillac, and already he has her screaming.

“Fucking hell!” she bellows, along with a few more choice words. “Your car’s bloody freezing!”

Gold opens his own door and hobbles into his seat. He appears unperturbed by both her outburst and the frigid leather seats. “If you hadn’t noticed, dearie, it’s winter in Maine.”

Lacey elbows him. “Well, turn on the bleeding heat, then!”

The car roars to life, but Gold makes no move to warm his car. “The heater in this car is bollocks,” he informs her. “We’ll reach my home before it starts working.”

“Well, I hope your house’s central heating works,” Lacey grumbles.

Gold eyes her slender legs appreciatively. “It was when I left,” he assures her, “but if, in my twenty minute absence, that has changed…” He rakes his gaze upwards, leaving no inch of her scantily dressed body unappreciated. “...Well, I have every confidence that together, the two of us can find a way to keep warm.”

Lacey, who believes herself to be immune to innuendo, barely keeps from gasping. That brogue, that implication, it sizzles down her spine, and she becomes wet, just from his fucking voice.

She warns herself to tread carefully. She worries she could lose more than a few hours in this man’s arms.

_________________

When they enter Gold’s suitably heated, surprisingly pink home, he wastes little time in kissing Lacey. She knows from the gleam in his eye and the hardness pressing into her leg that his speed is borne of desire rather than prejudice because of her reputation. He wants her, badly, and as his tongue sweeps across her lips, and she grants it entrance to her mouth, she feels the same desperation.

Gold walks with a cane, so they maneuver up the stairs as carefully as their lust allows them. Once, Gold’s bad leg misses a step, and he accidently nips at Lacey’s tongue. She growls at him, swallowing his hiss of pain, and she imagines she can feel his cock throbbing through his woolen trousers.

They reach his bedroom, and for a moment, they both lose their confidence. For the first time in a long time, Lacey worries about how the man she’s taking to bed sees her. Gold, who wears disdain and iniquity for much the same reason that other people wear raincoats, almost looks nervous.

“You should know,” Gold tells her softly, “that is has been a very, very long time since I have taken a woman to bed.”

Again, Lacey experiences quaking desire for the man before her.

“As it happens,” she purrs, regaining just enough swagger to pull him downwards, “taking people to bed is my expertise.”

She thinks she will lead the way, that what Gold needs is for her to press him back into his bed so she can give him the riding of his life, but he thoroughly surprises in that respect.

_________________

Gold grabs her roughly around the waist, although not so roughly as to raise her alarm. He crushes Lacey’s mouth in another kiss, one that sears her.

At first he does not open his mouth, so Lacey teases his soft lips with the tip of her tongue. He tastes sweetly minty, and she enjoys stroking against him. When Gold does part his lips, he sucks gently upon her tongue. Then he slips his tongue into her mouth, and she returns the favor. They press together long enough, arms twining around each other, that Lacey wonders if her heart will burst from her chest, it beats so rapidly.

When Gold’s nimble fingers dance across her thigh, edging her dress’s hemline higher, Lacey swoons. He continues to tease, first tracing patterns over her stockings, then rubbing her more firmly.

“Please,” Lacey gasps against his cheek, nearly undone.

Gold chuckles. “Lay down for me.”

Lacey teeters towards his grand-four poster, and she hears him following her, potently powerful despite his limp. She turns to face him, backing up until her legs hit his bed. She sits and lowers herself onto her elbows, so she can watch him work.

Gold kneels, and Lacey sees that the movement cost him just a little. He takes her left ankle in his hands and bends down to place a reverent kiss upon the delicate curve. A husky moan escapes Lacey, and Gold chuckles again.

“I promise not to make you wait much longer,” he says. “But you cannot blame a mortal for worshipping a goddess who has fallen into his bed.”

Gold eases her stiletto off of one foot, then the other. He stands, his soft grunt the only concession to his ankle’s strain, so that he can push Lacey’s sequined dress up to her waist. He draws her sheer black stockings down her trembling legs, discarding them over his shoulder. Lacey’s knickers go the way of her stockings, and she thinks he will finally speed up, carry her at a breakneck speed towards a blinding orgasm, but again, Gold surprises her.

_________________

His eyebrow quirks as he considers her womanhood.

“Shaven?” Gold asks.

“Waxed,” Lacey replies.

“I hate to disappoint, dearie, but no one will ever be allowed near my genitals with hot wax or a  razor.”

“It’ll make your cock look bigger.”

Gold gives her a positively devastating grin. “Don’t let the car or the house fool you, dearie.” He bent to place a kiss upon her clit, which peaks out from between swollen lips. “I am not compensating for anything.”

Lacey, who has seen a plethora of dicks and heard even more men brag about theirs, believes Gold unreservedly.

He parts her labia and croons comfortingly when he sees how she trembles for him. Lacey squirms under his scrutiny, so eager to feel his tongue against her most sensitive place. She has exactly one client who goes down on her, the Storybrooke’s red-headed psychiatrist, but he lacks skill, and she has concluded the act is own personal therapy.

In this arena, she doubts Gold will disappoint as well.

When he finally bends down and runs his tongue from her entrance up the seam of her pussy to the very tip of her clit, Lacey howls. She snaps his restraint, for he howls and buries his face between her legs. Gold is relentless in his pursuit of Lacey’s pleasure, replacing his tongue with his nose and soft scrapes of his teeth at bone-melting intervals. Lacey is sensitive tonight, so fucking sensitive, and she bucks forward into his willing mouth.

She climaxes intensely, her thighs clamped firmly around his head, the heels of her feet beating Gold’s back.

“Jesus! Joseph! Mary!” Lacey wails when she realizes Gold has no intention of stopping at one. His prodigious mouth continues its work, and Lacey keens when he slips a finger inside of her and crooks it.

She grabs a handful of his hair and yanks, hard. Gold doesn’t miss a beat, and he quirks his eyebrow again as if to say, ‘Busy here, dearie.’

“If you fucking stop,” Lacey warns him.

He goes, just for a moment.

“Not until Saint Peter’s trumpet beckons,” he promises.

Lacey wonders if the holy figures have ever been more inappropriately intoned, but Gold adds a second finger to the first, and she cannot focus on anything that does not involve her quick, overwhelming succession of orgasms.

_________________

Later, after Lacey pries Gold away from her pussy, fearing one of them would expire if she didn’t put an end to his superb cunnilingus, she looks around the room for the first time.

It is smaller than the master bedroom in such a house would be. Lacey knows his wife died years ago, and that an even worse tragedy followed thereafter, and she suspects he moved in here after the deaths. Grieving men have done stranger things, in her experience.

Everything in Gold’s bedroom appears to serve some mean purpose: a wardrobe, a clock, one bedside table, on his side of the bed.

Tiredly, Lacey observes, “A pocket watch. I never pegged you for a hipster, Gold.”

He stops massaging his jaw and reaches for the silver pocket watch, which sits on his bedside table. Lacey recalls, briefly, seeing the chain of it dangle beneath his jacket in the liquor aisle. Gold brushes his fingers across the surface of the watch.

“My son gave it to me,” he tells her softly. “Right before.”

Lacey readily admits that she can be a bitch, but she didn’t know she could still feel this horrible. She won’t apologize, because people like Gold and her, they hear many false apologies, the sort that absolve the makers’ guilt while further burdening the wronged. She does for Gold what she wishes people had done for her, back when people cared enough about her pain to bother.

She takes his hand in hers, and she rolls over so she can spoon against him. Gold remains on his back, but he shifts his arm so she can press closer to him. Lacey takes a moment to admire the sharpness of his chin and the elegance of his collar bone before she tucks her neck into that intimate place.

Her closeness to him feels right and true.

Lacey knows this means she must hurt Gold badly before they part, because to leave things the way they are progressing would imply something which she does not feel ready to comprehend.

_________________

They sleep through the night. Gold awakens first, and he admires the woman sleeping next to him. He has wanted Lacey in his bed for an indecently long amount of time, and if he had cared any less about her, he would have come to her with cash in hand.

But it has always mattered to Gold that he be different than the others.

When he limps from his bed to see to his morning ablutions, Gold glances out the window.

His jaw drops.

_________________

Lacey awakens to Scottish curses.

“It would appear,” Gold tells her, staring out the window, “that we will be spending Christmas together.”

When she joins him, Lacey sees nothing but snow. A veritable blizzard stormed its way through Storybrooke the night before, piling white powder as high as the second floor. Gold is right. Escape will not come for some time.

The prospect of spending the holiday with Gold does not bother her in the slightest.

 _‘Kill it with fire,’_ Lacey thinks, furious at her emotions’ betrayal of her.

_________________

Lacey sucks him off downstairs. She catches Gold by surprise, already on her knees by the time he turns around in the kitchen, his question about how she takes her coffee dying on his lips.

“With a shot of cum,” she purrs, and Gold flatters himself that this is not Lacey, Lady of the Night, speaking, but rather, Lacey, Unbelievably Turned On By Your Cock.

She makes quick work of his silk pajama bottoms and even quicker work of his boxer briefs. Gold ate her out with such fervor the night before in part because it had been a very long time, and he hadn’t trusted himself not to blow his load at the first whiff of her musky arousal. He feels overwhelming gladness that he pleasured her to the point of collapse, because the happy chirp Lacey makes when she sees his cock almost makes him disgrace himself across his cheek.

 _‘Although, that is the end goal, is it not?’_  Gold thought.

Lacey took his erection in her hand and bit her lip, grinning at the tip of him. “You make good on your promises and then some,” she giggles. “I am really going to enjoy this.”

Gold moans and thrusts forward. He would feel sheepish, but he hesitates to waste his remaining faculties on anything besides satisfying his own need.

When Lacey gently rolls his foreskin back and sets to worrying the seam right under the head of his cock, it is as if she had sent liquid lightning shooting down his cock and out of every pore. Gold cannot stop himself: he shrieks and grabs a fistful of her chestnut curls.

“Don’t worry about hurting me, dearie,” Lacey drawls wickedly. “Hair pulling is a definite turn-on.”

Without warning, she swallows him deep down her throat. Gold feels her nose press into his pubic bone and feels her tongue stroking his heavy balls.

Man was not built to withstand such temptations.

He erupts and roars and lets waves of sizzling pleasure carry him away.

_________________

Lacey will not be leaving Gold for some time, perhaps another day or two, and the pair of them, normally so infelicitous of others’ company, fall into an easy rhythm together. They agree without actually discussing it that two people who’ve buried their faces in each other’s crotches have already knocked out ninety-nine percent of the small talk subjects two strangers can discuss.

The baring of their souls comes alarmingly quickly for Lacey.

She notices, as they eat Christmas lunch, that Gold has brought his silver pocket watch downstairs with him. He notices her notice the watch, and he speaks plainly to her about his son’s death.

“My wife fell in love with a traveling musician,” he tells her.

Lacey knows the bare bones of this tale. Gold’s wife and his son died mere months after her mother, and she remembers wondering if he wanted to rip his heart from his chest and crush it, too.

“We didn’t have an ideal marriage,” Gold continues, cutting his salad into smaller pieces, focusing on a largely unnecessary task to make the story more bearable. “It all seems so cliche now. A traveling musician, for fuck’s sake.”

As Gold’s hands become more busy, Lacey’s cease all activity. She will listen to him with every ounce of concentration available to her. He must move, and she must bear witness.

Again, she frets over this deep well of caring Gold has opened within her.

 _‘Kill it with fire,’_ she repeats to herself.  _‘You will kill this with fire and be done with it. But first, you will hear him.’_

“What I mean, dearie, is that I would have let her go. She would have asked me for steep alimony payments, and I could have afforded them. But what she did decide to take was too great a price for me to bear.”

The son. Lacey remembers: the late Mrs. Gold took her son with her when she left. Their son. Gold’s son.

“I loved my boy so very much.” Gold pauses. His Adam’s apple bobs. It tugs at Lacey to see such an austere man so far from the edge of his cultivated disdain.

_‘Soon, fire. Now, listen.’_

“I would not allow her to take him from me. We argued. Not loudly, because our son was asleep, but very passionately. As bad a wife as she might have been, she was a good mother.” Another pause. “And I was a good father. A bad husband, as well, but a good father. We wanted the best for him, and each of us was convinced that we were the best. Eventually, we both calmed down, and she asked for a cup of tea. I obliged.”

Gold grips the pocket watch tightly in his fist. Now comes the worst of it, Lacey knows.

“When I returned, moments later, they were gone. I heard a car start, ran outside to see it pulling away. Her traveling musician had been waiting outside, and they meant to cuckold me and rob me of my boy in the same breath.” Gold’s voice tightens with anger, but Lacey believes it is of the self-loathing variety. “I gave chase. It was winter, and the roads were icy, and I had to speed to catch them. Soon, we were both barreling down the road, going far too fast.”

Oh no, Lacey realizes. The worst has yet to be told.

“As it turns out, dearie, traveling musicians have little experience regaining control of a car when it spins out. They were on the old toll bridge, me coming up fast behind them. The car went over the edge, into the water.” Gold meets her gaze. They do not back away from pain, especially not pain deserved. They stare it dead on. In this, Lacey knows they are alike. “There’s a window of time, you see, to escape a car that is submerged in water. My wife and my son missed that window.”

Before her father took to the drink, he worked as a fireman, and Lacey recalls visiting him at the station not long after Gold’s wife and his son died. The station kept, and probably still keeps, old wreckages, to use as cautionary tales.

Lacey remembers clearly seeing a rusting old beater next to the charred remains of another car. One of the windows had been broken; the others were intact. The traveling musician’s vehicle, she thinks. The death of another man’s wife so close on the heels of losing his own wife. What a burden for her papa to bear.

When she knows Gold has finished, Lacey goes to him, places her head in his lap.

It seems obscene, but he hardens gladly for her, and she takes him in her mouth again.

_________________

Boxing Day passes. Lacey does not leave, and she does not fuck Gold. He is taken enough with her mouth and she with his.

She tells him the minutia and the grandeur of her own life’s tragedies. She tries to convince herself that by explaining to him how her mother’s death broke her father, and how her father’s alcoholism broke her, that she offers him fair warning about how badly they will end. Hour by hour, Gold looks more tenderly upon her, the expression so new to his face that she cannot possibly miss it, and it makes her want to rage at him.

Lacey thinks, if she left now, that he would chase after her, too. She suspects he does not judge or hold against her character the mistakes she has made, the paths down which she has tumbled. She knows she feels the same way about him.

Love has been forged out of so much less. And love always fails Lacey. She cannot take his adoration as an albatross around her neck.

And yet foolishly, she continues to give him the pieces of herself which will let him know her.

_________________

“Queen’s Lace,” she tells him two days after she arrived, her cheek resting against her thigh, the tanginess of his cum still fresh on her tongue.

Gold pops up, confused. “Come again, dearie?”

Lacey slinks up the bed towards him, infuriatingly flattered by the way his eyes linger upon her swaying hips. “My mum named me Queen’s Lace,” she says, “apostrophe and all.”

“A curious name for a curious woman,” Gold comments.

Lacey sprawls across him. She will tuck her face between his chin and collarbone shortly. “It grew on the hillside outside of her childhood home. She and her mum used to pick bouquets for my grandpa. She promised me we’d visit them someday and pick some flowers of our own.” Lacey shrugs. “We did. Or, I did. She was there, and she was not.”

Gold waits for her to continue. He never rushes to fill her silences. Oh, have mercy, but this man knew how to impress.

“What I mean is, we didn’t visit until after she died.” Lacey pauses. “Mum was in a vase that I could fit on my lap at that point. It didn’t make sense to me, how half of my universe could fit into a case.”

It went without saying, the other half shortly thereafter collapsed, a black hole, taking with it Lacey’s chance at a healthy childhood.

“My son had the watch on him, when he died,” Gold admits. Lacey know he speaks not to blot out her pain with his own but to make her understand: he has pondered such horrible, ugly questions himself. “His mother must have helped him procure it from my pawnshop. He engraved it, too.”

Gold presents to Lacey the watch.

_Now you will always know playtime. Love, NG._

Lacey’s stomach churns. The phrase barely makes sense to her, obviously written by a young child.

She kisses Gold. The watch slides out of his hand. They make love and find that together they can keep their demons at bay.

Love has been forged out of so much less.

_________________

Storybrooke bores Lacey.

She wants to see the world. New York, Paris, Tokyo.

She needs money and has none. Not the worst problem a girl could face, not when the richest man in Storybrooke slumbers beside her, his front pressing against her back.

Lacey prowls the house before making her selection. She finds jewelry in the unused master bedroom and silver candlesticks in the dining room downstairs. Lacey possesses the sharpest mind in town, and she also recognizes the less obvious treasures: a first edition copy of a Hans Christian Anderson tale, an authentic medieval gauntlet, a pair of macabre puppets fashioned by a famed woodcarver.

But when Lacey flees the pink house and a still slumbering Gold, she carries only the pocket watch, and she quickly rids herself of it. Lacey flings it off of the old toll bridge, and the river sweeps it away, to a place Gold can never reclaim it.

She knows she has scorched the earth. Gold will never forgive her, and if he chases her at all, it will probably be to wring her neck.

_Kill it with fire._

_________________

Lacey thought she would never set foot in Storybrooke again, and certainly not the police station. The cold addled her mind. How could such a smart woman think she could flee town on foot so shortly after a blizzard?

Sheriff Humbert no longer lectures her about how absolutely idiotic is was of her to be outdoors in such ridiculous clothing on such a freezing night. He fixes her a cup of tea and tells her she can stay at the station as long as she pleases.

Funny. Lacey used to think Humbert was attractive. She knows better now. He has a round sort of chin and no elegance to his collar bone.

The door to the station bursts open. Gold stands in the doorway, and he looks wrecked. His shoulders slump when he sees Lacey, and he steps forward, his visage furious.

“I threw it off of the old toll bridge,” Lacey tells him. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough.”

She chokes back a sob. Nothing will ever be enough to get him to forgive her, and now she finds that is all she wants from him: a love that is unconditional, upon which she can rely.

Gold nods once. “I see. And you. Your plans to leave?”

“For now, nonexistent.”

He nods again. “Your intention wasn’t so much to hurt me as it was to make me despise you.”

Lacey looks at him, curious. He no longer looks enraged. He wants facts, not apologies.

“And you would never, will never, hurt me like that again?” he asks.

“Oh, no, never,” Lacey swears.

Humbert watches dumbly at Lacey rises to her feet, hope blossoming within her.

Gold crushes it with a single curt nod of his head. “So be it.” He turns and storms back through the door.

Lacey’s devastation must show on her face. Graham reels back from her, stunned and unsure of what to do. He grasps at straws and comes up with professionality.

“Did you, uh, steal something from Mr. Gold?” he asks. “I might, uh, need to talk to him about that…”

Gold bursts back into the police station so suddenly that her legs buckle. He moves to catch her, and he succeeds. Love was forged out of so much less.

"I went out to start the Cadillac's heater," Gold says gruffly as he holds her close to him. "I didn’t want you to be cold, this time."

Silence stretches out between them.

"I thought you knew why I left," Gold continues. "Assumed you knew I would come back, once I'd started the car."

Another pause. Lacey finds it difficult to draw breath.

"But then I realized how it must have seemed, storming out with barely a word," he admitted. "I do not speak everything on my mind, but I expect those around me to know how I feel nonetheless. It cost me my marriage, my wife, my son."

Lacey rests her face in that sweet crook between his sharp chin and his elegant collarbone.

“When I awoke, and you were gone, I was so frightened,” Gold admits. “Furious, at first, for taking the watch, but as the hours passed, and I knew you had to be out in the cold, I realized how much more I would miss you.”

His words knit together old wounds, makes Lacey think they have a chance.

"I am a difficult man to love," Gold tells her at last.

Lacey snorts. "If you hadn't noticed," she says, "I have a few foibles of my own."

"Queen's Lace," Gold murmurs reverently, "how would you like to rule this town with me?"

Lacey looks into his face and sees a long journey: there will be arguments and hurt feelings, and she must atone for her cruelty to him, and sometimes their old demons will barge into their newfound happiness and run amok. It will take nothing short of love to wrestle them back into their proper places. 

She cannot wait to embark.


End file.
